ONLINE DRIVERS MEDIA

Dont obsess about "optimal" antioxidant contents, just eat your veggies!

Over the past couple of weeks, ... no actually over the past years I have repeatedly written about the concept of (mito-)hormesis and its consequences for the well-established, but not necessarily accurate free radical theory of aging (and for some people everything else). ROS, i.e. reactive oxygen species, have been established as an important signalling molecule that is - among other things - heavily involved in the insulin sensitizing effects of exercise. "Inflammation" makes muscles grow and burns body fat and the "what doesnt kill me makes me strong" principle appears to reign everywhere you look.
That being said, the latest study from the Institute of Health and Environmental Medicine in Tianjin, China, opens another "anti-antioxidant" Box of Pandora. One that puts a huge questionmark behind the implications of hundreds of thousands of scientific studies, when it says in its title, already: "No correlation is found for vegetables between antioxidant capacity and potential benefits in improving antioxidant function in aged rats"

"Skin of Grape Tomatoes Contains Max. Amount of Antioxidants" - You can find this and dozens of other daily updated SuppVersity Science News on www.facebook.com/SuppVersity

This is a title that may in fact change the way we look at study results like those of a recent study by Valdez-Morales, et al. (2014) investigating the "best" = highest antioxidant tomato, the results of which you are about to find among the ~20/day SuppVersity Facebook News @ www.facebook.com/SuppVersity - dont forget to like it, or youll miss out on the latest science news!

If the results of the study can be confirmed by an independent team for vegetables other than lotus root, rape or cucumber and if there is an identical mismatch between the in-vivo anti-oxidant capacity and the potential benefits in improving antioxidant function in (aged) humans.

This would be big and highly consequential news for nutrition experts, scientists and average Joes and Janes like you and me. Why? Well,...

• any ranking of "superfoods" that was based even partly on in vitro data derived with the good old ferric reducing antioxidant power (FRAP) assay would be invalid, ...
• every scientist who has been following up on "promising" data from FRAP assays would have been wasting his time, ...
• and you may have been eating all the wrong foods for years...

... hell no, as long as you ate your veggies over the past years, I wouldnt worry if you may have made a "suboptimal" selection (which would be different based on whatever new criteria you select).

Figure 1: FRAP value, vitamin C and vitamin E content and total amount phenolics in the powdered vegetables that were added to the rodent diets in the study at hand (Ji. 2014)

Honestly, Id hope that you didnt select your foods only based on the orthorexic principle of maximal antioxidant content, anyways. 

Never forget the three principles of veggie eating: Variety, seasonality, colorfulness

Against that background Id recommend you keep eating your lotus roots, if you like them, although, they have a significantly lower beneficial effect on SuperOxide Dismutase (SOD, a group of antioxidant enzymes) than rape and cucumber.

Figure 2: Serum markers of anti-oxidant status / oxidative damage after 6 weeks on the three experimental diets (Ji. 2014)

Moreover, if you look closely at the data in Figure 1+2, you will realize that lotus may suck at SOD and its ability to reduce hemolysis (the destruction of red blood cells), but will have the most profound beneficial effects on the levels of malondealdehyde (MDA), a marker of lipid oxidation, and the amount of plasma carbonyls, which have - just as in cellular regulation, aging, and disease (Levine. 2002). Just like their similarly radical cousins, carbonyls will thus play a dual role so that in the end, their reduction may not be beneficial in each and every case.
Reference: 

• Ji, Linlin, et al. "No correlation is found for vegetables between antioxidant capacity and potential benefits in improving antioxidant function in aged rats." Journal of Clinical Biochemistry and Nutrition 54.3 (2014): 198-203.
• Levine, Rodney L. "Carbonyl modified proteins in cellular regulation, aging, and disease^{2, 3}." Free Radical Biology and Medicine 32.9 (2002): 790-796.
• Valdez-Morales, Maribel, et al. "Phenolic content, and antioxidant and antimutagenic activities in tomato peel and seeds, and tomato by-products." Journal of Agricultural and Food Chemistry (2014). Accepted Manuscript.

Pancakes al cacao & your gut: Bad grains and good cacao?

There is an increasing amount of interesting scientific publications on the role of the gut microbiome in health and disease. Unfortunately, the evidence on what exactly influences the number and types of bacteria in our gut in a beneficial way and even what exactly a "beneficial way" actually is, is yet largely unknown.

In todays installment of the SuppVersity Short News, I am going to take a closer look at a selection of recent studies that may shed at least some light at the previously mentioned questions.

• Cacao as a gut microbiome modulator - The first study were going to look at deals with cacao. Cacao and its effect on the gut microbiome. In said study, 3-week-old Wistar and Brown Norway rats were fed, for 4 weeks, either a standard diet or the following three isoenergetic diets containing increasing proportions of cocoa flavonoids from different sources: one with 0·2 % polyphenols (from conventional defatted cocoa), and two others with 0·4 and 0·8 % polyphenols (from non-fermented cocoa, very rich in polyphenols).
  
  

  Only the regular theobromine containing cacao did also reduce the weight gain in the three-week study (Massot-Cladera. 2014).

  What the scientist found, when they analyzed the serum Ig concentrations, faecal IgA levels, microbiota composition and IgA-coating bacterial proportion at the end of the study and compared them to those at the beginning was a significant beneficial effect on the mucosal IgA levels and microbiota composition from all supplements. The 0.2 % cacao diet which contained a higher proportion of theobromine and fibre, however, had a more profound impact on the aforementioned parameters - in spite of the fact that there was less cacao in the diet. Obviously, the caffeine-like bitter alkaloid from cacao is contributes to the beneficial effects of cacao in a similar way as the polyphenols.
  
  As the body weight data in Figure 1 shows, the theobromine containing conventional cacao was also the only one that was able to reduce the diet induced weight gain in the rats. This could, but does not necessarily have to be related to the higher levels of Bacteroides, Bifidobacterium and Lactobacillus bacteria in the gut of the rodents that received the "cheap" conventional cacao.
• Acidic water triggers type I diabetes - probably by modulating the gut microbiome - No, I am not trying to advertise bicarbonate, here. I am just reporting the results of a recent study from the Medical University of South Carolina which found that a stain of mice thats particularly susceptible to type I diabetes developed insulitis and hyperglycemia rapidly, only when the mice were maintained on acidic pH water (AW).
  
  

  Suggested Article: "High Dietary Acid Load Doubles Risk of Type II Diabetes in Lean Individuals! Causative or Corollary? Plus: Are Grains, not Meats the Main Offenders in Our Diet?" | read more.

  The scientists also observed that this effect could be countered by fecal transplants and was obviously triggered by changes in the diversity of the gut flora that occurred, when the pH of drinking water was in the acidic range and were probably related to the proinflammatory cytokine response in the intestinal mucosa.
  
  As you as a SuppVersity reader know previous studies in humans have already shown that a "High Dietary Acid Load Doubles Risk of Type II Diabetes in Lean Individuals!" (read more) - Who knows, this could also be related to the effect on the gut microbiome!?
• Gluten and whole grains as modulators of the gut microbome - In two recent randomized cross-over trials, researchers from the University of Copenhagen determined the impact of dietary gluten or whole grains on the gut microbiome and host metabolic health.
  
  What the researchers found was what the recent backlash against gluten and "healthy" whole grains on the internet would suggest the already overweight "[p]articipants had slightly elevated fasting glucose levels and increased waist circumference" (Ibrügger. 2014).
  

  Table 1: Overview of the products used in the randomized controlled cross-over trials (Ibrügger. 2014)

  Whether thats related to the effects on the gut microbome is unfortunately something I cant tell you, yet. Why? Well, the currently available paper refers to a future publication that would outline the detailed results. All I can tell you now is that the study used the products listed in Table 1 and, more importantly, that it is its high statistical power, which, due to the large sample size and the crossover design, "allows detecting even small diffrences in the outcome variables" (Ibrügger. 2014).

References:

• Ibrügger, S., et al. "Two Randomized Cross-Over Trials Assessing the Impact of Dietary Gluten or Wholegrain on the Gut Microbiome and Host Metabolic Health." J Clin Trials 4.178 (2014): 2167-0870.
• Massot-Cladera, Malen, et al. "Impact of cocoa polyphenol extracts on the immune system and microbiota in two strains of young rats." British Journal of Nutrition 112.12 (2014): 1944-1954.
• Sofi, M. Hanief, et al. "pH of drinking water influences the composition of gut microbiome and type 1 diabetes incidence." Diabetes 63.2 (2014): 632-644.